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New Escapist Column! On the Complicated Seventies Nostalgia of “Poker Face”…

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the end of the first season of Poker Face last week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at the show.

Poker Face is obviously designed as something of a seventies throwback. The show is very obviously a hybrid of classic seventies television like Columbo and Kung-Fu. However, there’s more than simple nostalgia at play within the series. Poker Face is a show about grappling with the memory and legacy of the seventies, of understanding why these stories resonate in the modern world. It has a nuanced and complicated relationship with the era from which it draws, which makes for compelling television.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

218. Warrior (#162)

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

So this week, Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior.

Brendan and Tommy are two brothers that have lived very different lives, but find themselves on a collision course. Brendan is a struggling teacher who is going to lose his family home, while Tommy is a war veteran with a mysterious past who seems to need a mechanism to work through his trauma. Both men find themselves embroiled in a brutal mixed martial arts tournament with a life-changing prize fund. However, the two might need to go through one another to earn it.

At time of recording, it was ranked 162nd on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Non-Review Review: Hulk

Ang Lee directing a superhero movie? He’s certainly a strange choice to handle the first big screen adaptation of Marvel’s iconic green monster to the big screen, but arguably a smart one. Hulk is at its best when it hints at the psychological melodrama playing out behind its lead character, but suffers greatly from the fact that it is apparently really uncertain about its source material or what it wants to be. It’s weird to see a movie so wonderfully risky in one sense, but so utterly bland in others. Hulk is an experiment, but sadly isn’t consistent enough to be a successful one.

"Hulk Splash!"

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